Subverting imperial greenwashing

by Vijay Kolinjivadi

Max Ajl’s recent book published this year by Pluto Press, entitled A People’s Green New Deal, is a welcome and important contribution to an increasingly crowded and confused conversation on “green” futures. In the industrialized countries of the Global North, especially the USA, the European Union, Canada, and Australia, governments, social movements, and everything in between have proposed “Green Deals” of varying demands, generating much confusion as to what each of them stand for and the types of interests that underpin them. Ajl’s book places particular attention on the prospects of a US Green New Deal; as the US economy directly infiltrates nations and social classes around the world with its military, petrodollars, and monopolies, what it decides to do in the name of “greening” will have profound implications on the rest of the world under the current order.

The book offers a refreshing analysis, grounded in an ecosocialist lens for a global anti-imperialist class struggle. In doing so, it distinguishes itself from the distractions of rhetoric loosely being advanced under an amorphous “Green New Deal”. Ajl details these distracting narratives as they range from: a) liberal progressives and social democrats using all the right words but ultimately compromising to the interests of capital by advocating things like “greening” the US military; b) techno-modernist socialism unhinged from basic understandings of ecology while continuing to depend on exploitation of a Third World (e.g. “fully-automated luxury communism”); c) Euro-centric working-class solidarities for “greening” in the industrial core that conveniently ignore precarious and racialized labor forces both within and beyond the “Global North” (e.g. “Ecological Politics for the Working Class”); d) global veganism and half-earth nature conservation that have no qualms about embracing colonial logics against non-Western ideologies and affinities, and e) status-quo United Nations and World Bank-speak in support of the “Sustainable Development Goals”, furthering the myth of “green growth” and paying for nature’s “services”, which have thus far done little to halt or have even reinforced global inequalities and hastened ecological collapse. Of course, these narratives are not mutually exclusive, but hybridize into different shades. Common to all however are the silences in demanding climate reparations for historically uneven ecological exchange in which imperialist colonizers of Europe and North America looted the resources and life-energies of billions of people and displaced and shackled hundreds of millions in the Global South as a cheap laboring force to keep prices low and speculative finance afloat. It is this oppressive unequal ecological exchange that makes it possible for countries like Switzerland and Belgium to be considered chocolate connoisseurs, for the United States to foster and produce “innovative” tech hubs like Silicon Valleys that produce tax-evading billionaires, and for cities across Scandinavia, Canada, and Australia to be consistently distinguished with high standards of living.

There can be no such thing as an ecologically-conscious future unless it involves popular control over time, territory, and ways of living.

Put simply, there can be no such thing as an ecologically-conscious future unless it involves popular control over time, territory, and ways of living that Indigenous people, pastoralists, campesinxs, and artisans around the world demand as restitution for historical and repeated assaults on their autonomy. In this review, I assemble a series of quotations from the book under broad themes that highlight a few key take-away messages as well as an invitation to further dive into the details by reading the book. I conclude with some issues I felt the book left the reader to ponder.

Main take-aways

To control industrialization does not mean to eliminate industrialization, let alone modern social life with complex forms of economic interchange and interdependence. It means understanding how on the one hand, the North is gratuitously over-industrialized, and not to the benefit of working-class life. And it means accepting how much northern industrial capital, and the consumption which it encourages, rests on de-development or underdevelopment of the South.”

What is missing in the First World left is not an abstract commitment to solidarity and partnership but a committed internationalism which takes the anti-systemic struggles of the periphery as the fundamental departure point for solidarity…thus climate debt or ecological debt must be a fundamental part of any serious green transition.”

If capital is under pressure from social movements or political parties and needs to find a way to give something away to domestic middle classes, that something has to come from somewhere (my emphasis added). And that somewhere will be those not included in the social and political struggles: in other words, the South.

Ajl’s work offers a reality check reminding us that the influence of ecosocialism in contemporary global politics is at a historical low and indeed superseded by the more organized forces around pro-capitalist and techno-futurist versions of eco-fascism. The (often failed) electoral politics ambitions of recent legislators like Bernie Sanders in the US, Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France, and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK should not distract us from this reality. He also emphasizes the utter importance of placing agrarian reform for agroecology and peasant sovereignty at the core of what an anti-imperialist ecosocialism would require.

Modern industrial agriculture does not feed the world; it is incredibly wasteful and takes the capacity to produce food away from people who understand their territory the best. Instead, it forces everyone to be market consumers of pesticide-ladened and chemical fertilizer pumped monocultures that generate mass death of pollinators, birds, and soil life. It also heightens the risk of animal-human transfers of new epidemic diseases that lead to potential pandemics. With industrial agriculture, being fed is no longer something that every human deserves but something that reflects purchasing power and the capacity to absorb rising costs of food . These values neatly follow racial and class lines, with the vast majority of people unable to afford healthy and sustainable food production systems as these are re-branded into market consumption as “artisanal”, “organic”, or “heirloom”. Perhaps worst of all is the way modern industrial agriculture mines arable soils, stealing time, land, and knowledge from human societies and rendering current and future generations bereft of food-producing potential.

Why an internationalist, anti-imperialist politics is what being ecological should refer to

Colonialism itself is not over. As formal and legal decolonization gave way to neocolonialism, nations lost control over their economic sovereignty, the pot of gold they had hoped to find at the end of national liberation…Indeed, even during the brilliant noon of decolonization from 1947 to 1980, farmlands, forests, banks, currencies, factories, salt iron mines, quarries, and oil fields remained in the hands of the colonizers. Almost never was decolonization so successful as to allow peoples to fully determine their own histories, even within their own nation-states…the climate crisis is basically the child of northern imperialism, pure and simple.

Ajl reminds readers that it is impossible for the global ecological breakdown that we witness today, such as CO2 levels reaching their highest levels in 3 million years, to have occurred without past and present (and expected future) dehumanization of black, brown, and Indigenous people. It is consequently impossible and counterproductive to treat ecological crises like climate change as separate from those that perpetuate settler colonial land grabs, class divisions, and a military industrial complex. Tackling ecological crises requires structural transformation rejecting a militarized global police force (e.g. the US military) that justifies war-profiteering over the lives of Yemenis and Palestinians in the name of free markets.

Why other Green New Deal proposals based on “green” social democracy or domestic “green” Keynesianism are fundamentally flawed

There are four problems with green social democracy. First, it is not achievable through current strategies. Two, even if it were possible, it would be imperialist and rest on devastating the South. Third, it is being marketed as something it is not: namely, eco-socialism … and four, it limits our political imaginations.”

This does not mean it is bad to have anti-racist green left-liberals in office. It means that they will not implement eco-socialism unless massive movements and parties outside the state, and worldwide, are fighting for actual eco-socialism – which Ocasio-Cortez, 350.org, and the Sunrise Movement are not.”

Ajl historically contextualizes “green social democracy” as Keynesian concessions to labour that worked to stave off the spread of communism in the post-war era and were ultimately intended to reinforce capital accumulation. He highlights precisely why left-liberal politicians and journalists confound the terms of debate by ignoring this history. Instead, “green social democrats” tiptoe around very real uneven ecological exchange while superficially signalling support (largely by recourse to electoral politics) to anti-imperialist social movements and Indigenous demands around the world.

“Greening” as securitizing capitalism

Green Social Control aims to preserve the essence of capitalism while shifting to a greener model in order to sidestep the worst consequences of the climate crisis. [It] is a decision to avoid reparations [and] a blueprint for world management in which imperial loot remains in the North.”  

In relation to the confusing politics of Green Keynesianism as described above, a People’s Green New Deal explicitly rejects “green social control” or any eco-friendly attempt to maintain capitalism intact while deflecting or dismissing conversations around climate reparations for colonial violence and theft. Securing capitalism through greening takes the form of carbon offset purchases, eco-certification schemes, industrial and high-tech precision agriculture, “nature-based solution” projects and ecosystem service policies and others that co-opt intimate ecological relations as alienable forces of production.

On (green) technology

Those who argue in an absolute way for technology’s categorical social neutrality, especially from the left, forge one of the most dangerous, subtle, and effective instruments of ideological counterinsurgency: they accept the myth of progress and confuse opposition to the capitalist agenda. And this is dangerous, because capitalists do not choose technology willy-nilly, but in order to maximise power, as has been shown time and again by critical historians of technology.”

Amazon relies on a certain way of organizing the human relationship with the environment. Each item for sale on Amazon’s website, its energy-guzzling “cloud” data servers, its gossamer logistical systems which enable same-day delivery, is tied with a million threads to use of carbon sinks and the atmospheric space for CO2 emissions. These occur without the permission of humanity.”

To meet UK electric car targets in 30 years, the (British) Isles would need twice current world annual production of cobalt. It would swallow up current world production of neodymium, gobble three-fourths of world lithium production and at least half the world’s copper. If mileage did not shrink, to charge that monster fleet an additional 20% of current UK-generated electricity would be needed …. Cobalt, one necessary mineral, is kept cheap by a half century of neo-colonial massacre in the Congo, and lithium extraction turns on the mangling of Latin American water tables. Even now Microsoft, Tesla, and Dell are being sued for being party to child labor in the Congo mines that supply material for the batteries that keep their doodads cheap and briskly selling.”

Ajl emphasizes that technological futurism cannot be discussed in isolation from the interests and voices that fund and imagine it. Popular control of knowledge and deliberation of its impacts is dismissed in favor of techno-utopias dreamed up through visions of human exploitation, despite the window dressing of “fully-automated communism” or (white) working-class ecological politics. Technology, no matter how “green,” is therefore always political.

On the colonial violence of suggesting “global veganism”

Plant or culture-based meats … now rely on tremendous inputs of energy, and according to lifecycle assessments, may be more carbon-intensive than cows.” … “We have to keep in mind that the problem is not meat, but certain kinds of meat production: capitalist concentrated animal feeding operations.”

The demand that meat-eating cease … creates northern consensus around encouraging, coercively or otherwise, transformations of how people live. It also creates a justification for unnatural ‘climate solutions’ based around biofuels and bioenergy or ‘afforestation’ based on trash-tree plantations which will allow the great petroleum corporations to keep burning their assets, to great profit. And it will be the poor who will suffer.

A People’s Green New Deal would never impose universal cultural blueprints. It would not continue imposing imaginaries of human-nature relations from entitled Northern countries onto all people of the world through strategies like “compulsory global veganism” or “half-earth” conservation. Such tactics would scream colonialism and border on eco-fascism.

A People’s Green New Deal would never impose universal cultural blueprints.

On ways forward

Although we should embrace scientific advance in healthcare, from regrowing knee cartilage to organ transplants, the obstacle to world-class worldwide universal healthcare is not technological. It’s social. It demands a social revolution to shatter the capitalist organization of healthcare and to restructure it as primarily care-centered, preventative, and decentralized.

If social wealth is generally allocated based on labor inputs, relatively labor-intensive agroecology will receive more compensation…Command measures ought to extend to phase-outs of industrial agriculture, which has no justification for existing, and wholesale shifts in research spending away from conventional agricultural research and towards agroecology.”

Land should be redistributed everywhere. Each country should have total control over the food import and export trade, so that food dumping is impossible. Communities rather than farms should be in control of water, seed, and eventually land. This is the agenda of food sovereignty.

Intra-urban transportation would occur on bicycles, electronic bicycles, and mass transit, from trolleys to trains, where possible. Private cars would be most often reserved for ambulances and emergency transport – the times and places where society can collectively decide to use the fruits of inherently damaging industrial production in order to protect and convenience human life.”

Shifting from brick cladding, vinyl windows, asphalt shingles, and fiberglass insulation to a wood-frame house which substitutes those other products with cedar shingles and siding, wood windows, and insulation made from cellulose can convert such a home into a net absorber of CO2 emissions provided that when the house is demolished, the material is recycled instead of entering a landfill.

A People’s Green New Deal devotes its second half to sketching alternatives to the ‘Green Deal’ idea that put power back into the hands of workers, recognizing crucially how the production of “green” means exploitation of people especially in the Global South. It proposes several key improvements in terms of worker-controlled production; quality and anti-imperialist healthcare; urban re-design; large-scale agrarian reform and the dismantling of agri-business; intra-regional and collectively-controlled transportation systems, and locally-appropriating siting and construction of widespread social housing among other strategies.

In reflection: Thinking with and beyond A People’s Green New Deal for anti-imperialist organizing

Ajl’s A People’s Green New Deal has enormous implications for many who have put their eggs in the basket of “green” environmental politics. It is a wake-up call (or perhaps a slap in the face) to eco-minded social democrats, left liberals, and Green Party followers in rich countries to reassess the colonial violence of their proposals. Ajl stresses that Green New Deals have failed to center the rising tide of dissent ranging from Indigenous sovereignty on Turtle Island to Palestine, to the abolition of systemic racism and carceral assaults as demanded by “Black Lives Matter”, to reproductive control over (femme) bodies, to material transfers of “Land Back” and ecological debt reparations. A People’s Green New Deal redefines (or perhaps defines more clearly) what a just transition implies. Thus far, it is only the degrowth movement in the Global North that makes advances to redirecting the violent processes of growth; though tweaking the machinery of “growth” requires an explicitly anti-imperialist emphasis. As Ajl makes resoundingly clear, “greening” must be redirected as an international class struggle and demand for Indigenous sovereignty. The only way to do this is to ensure transfer of wealth back to those it was stolen from in the form of payment of climate debt (and ecological debt more broadly).

It is a wake-up call (or perhaps a slap in the face) to eco-minded social democrats, left liberals, and Green Party followers in rich countries.

Yet, the means by which such a profound cultural shift can be accomplished leaves the reader somewhat wanting. Ajl notes that “being has a tendency to determine consciousness”, referring to the fact that Global North bodies are less likely to feel and experience the effects of imperialism due to the comforts that they’ve inherited and continue to obtain from an “imperial mode of living”. The problem is simple, yet difficult to overcome: the absence of crucial experience in the inherited comfort of middle-class bodies without which the true depth and nature of ecological crises as a class struggle is potentially not graspable nor perceivable. As Catherine Liu recently writes in Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class, we left progressives in electoral politics, academia, journalism, and other facets of the creative sectors and knowledge economy refuse to talk about class or class consciousness in proposing solutions to things like social and ecological crises. As a result of repeatedly masking questions of our class status with deference to increased gender and racial identity politics and tolerance, the outcome over the past four decades has been an ultimate boon to neoliberal capitalism. Moreover, the perfectionist tendency to “be” and embody anti-oppressiveness as the key to social change excludes people that do not live up to a constructed (though often unspoken) ideal depicting a sort of commitment to struggle. It has also resulted in alienating allies for changing their minds or making mistakes. These legacies of a neoliberal era occur due to a deeply individualizing ethos of personal responsibility that permeates palpably in spaces of well-meaning self-identifying left progressives. The consequence has been the generation of new forms of leftist accommodation within liberal market economies around knowledge generation, and more detrimentally, a pernicious intransigence to truly organize in solidarity across class divides. The potential of engaging in anti-imperialist eco-socialist politics without falling into the trap of an identitarian bourgeois politics of anti-oppression Olympics needs careful attention yet is all too often brushed aside.

For others in less comfortable positions but who are able to get a foot in the door to the fabled “American”, “Canadian”, or “European” dream (even in the abject exploitation of their labor they may experience), the pressure to prove oneself as an entrepreneurial and well-behaved visible or cultural minority enormously sets back the possibility for working class solidarity. Given this gulf of class difference, through what cultural means can class convergence take form in practice? How might this arise? What will it take for comfortable, even anti-racist eco-minded liberal progressive Westerners (and other privileged groups elsewhere) to recognize that Indigenous sovereignty, Third World working class struggle, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour) peoples’ dreams for the future, and religious caste oppression are not side objectives, but fundamental for reversing ecological breakdown, generating and resurrecting alternative relations and relationships into being?

Alternatively, why should “greening” strategies direct attention to comfortable middle class Westerners at all? Why even (re)center voices of those who can’t possibly understand the material and everyday violence inflicted on countless people? Would it not make more sense for this demographic to cede place entirely and listen (for a change) by following the lead of those who have been and continue to be violently erased in the name of colonizer ecology? If this latter, what might this look like? These are questions that are left open in trying to imagine a “People’s Green New Deal” in action. It is here where thinking about organizing for anti-imperialist solidarity in the context of generational imperial living could benefit from both class- and region-specific context. What can liberal progressive-minded people in North America learn about “greening” from racial, labour, and decolonial struggles in their own communities? How have middle classes in places like Chile and Ecuador amplified voices and contributed through meaningful rather than performative allyship in anti-imperialist struggles?

Why should “greening” strategies direct attention to comfortable middle class Westerners at all?

Ajl raises some relevant points on the question of national sovereignty from imperialist resource and labour grabs, to reclaim popular control over the means of governing and administering resources in a society, and the role of a national governing body as an appropriate jurisdiction to ensure climate and ecological debts are transferred and appropriately administered. At the same time, he rightly stresses the “hierarchical international system organized around nation states.” Here, some greater clarification is needed. Since demands for national sovereignty often work in parallel to demands around land rights within capitalist political and economic relations, similar questions arise. Both have to do with understanding sovereignty not as a codifiable “right” but as a legitimate relationship. On the one hand, recognition of land rights and nation states are necessary to reclaim autonomy over cultural and economic lifeways; while on the other hand, they reduce diverse political subjectivities and relationships of territory to that of land or “national identity” as an entity to possess and enclose, to erect exclusionary borders around, to ally with or war against. How can overtly or indirectly socialist-oriented governments like Bolivia, Venezuela, and now Chile (under newly-elected Gabriel Boric) effectively reclaim popular control when they are at the same time imbricated within capitalist global markets for primary resources? What unintended effects does the stickiness of globalized markets and their infiltration into anti-imperialist ecosocialist national projects engender? Furthermore, how might the ‘national question’ support Indigenous sovereignty and demands for “Land Back” in different parts of the world? The potentially messy confluence between national sovereignty and a broader vision for an anti-imperialist (and thus anti-capitalist) internationalism needs some fleshing out. What comes first, a popular struggle to demand a fully internationalist anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist world order or nation states etching out sovereign ecosocialist agendas within an ossified and violently militarized capitalist world order? A People’s Green New Deal would require further guidance as to which of these strategies comes first as well as how they might interact or counteract each other.

Finally, Ajl argues that casting a glance away from these questions and instead turning to what is “feasible” or “pragmatic,” as liberal progressive professional managerial classes in the Global North all too often do, effectively confirms that the exploitation of people and nature from a fabricated Third World is an unquestioned necessity. But the questions of how to combat the always-present penchant for pragmatism, even among comrades on the Left, as well as the unexpected outcomes of trying to realize idealized forms of popular sovereignty and control among extremely heterogeneous and internally fractured societies remain open ones. Greater clarity is needed on how anti-imperialist local direct action or municipalisms can better align with an anti-imperialist internationalism, while perhaps reducing the role of the nation state to facilitating this convergence process.

Ajl rightly emphasizes that the “Left” is by no means organized enough. It is clear that status quo establishment has a firm hand in the driver’s seat of a melting planet when tax-evading fortune-500 companies own more wealth than entire countries (with politicians blithely casting their glance away and indeed participating in tax evasion schemes themselves), when stock market bros capitalize upon sophisticated machine learning to squeeze profits from Wall Street, or when eco-fascist elements carry on the legacy of systemic and historical Eurocentric imperialism in “solutions” like replacing (certain) human populations with pristine wilderness. Dislodging this cabal of eco-modernists (regardless of their capitalist or socialist inclinations) through popular revolt has never been more urgent and yet seemingly so far away. A global “People’s Green New Deal” therefore demands that our ecological practice is anti-colonial and anti-imperialist or nothing at all.

I’d like to thank Rut Elliot Blomqvist for helpful suggestions and edits to this piece. Also, many thanks to Gert Van Hecken for comments on an earlier draft.

Vijay Kolinjivadi is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp and writes about the politics and material contradictions of, and alternatives to, mainstream “greening” strategies. 

Blueprints for impossible futures

by Jesse Goldstein and Natalie Suzelis

Over the past two decades, a proliferation of “Green New Deal” literature has promoted various strategies for changing the structure of the global energy system to combat climate change.  While the term was first coined by the neoliberal economist Thomas Friedman, it has since been taken up by more progressive voices, from Keynesian social democrats to eco-socialists. Sadly, despite the promise of a new wave of climate-conscious legislation, from the European Green Deal and the UN Climate Agreement to the AOC-Markey legislation of 2019, each seems as unlikely as its predecessors to enact substantive change. At the recent COP 26 Climate Summit, for example, the United States failed to join 30 other nations in pledging to phase out sales of new gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles by 2040 worldwide. With the US federal government dominated by fossil-fuel friendly Democrats and climate-change denying Republicans, the chances of passing ambitious climate legislation appear bleak. In the absence of real political force, GND proposals often serve as blueprints that respond to a largely speculative question: what would we do if we were in a position of power to create meaningful, lasting, and necessary change? 

Instead of offering another blueprint for an impossible future, Max Ajl’s A People’s Green New Deal levels a critique at the genre itself, raising significant questions about the way that plans are proffered, and how most green futures implicitly accept the ongoing violence of capitalist imperialism. Ajl’s work engages critically with a wide spectrum of GND proposals, from policy documents like the European Commission and European Environmental Agency’s “European Green Deal” and Senator Ed Markey and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s House Resolution 109 to Naomi Klein’s On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal and A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal by Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Batistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos. Such proposals generally offer pragmatic solutions that work towards a “sustainable” future while remaining “realistic” enough to credibly promise to break through political impasse. The political and ecological horizons of these proposals may vary, but they all position themselves on the progressive edge of an electoral landscape that is – or so the story goes – slowly pushing in the direction of eco-social democracy. Yet eco-social democracy is, as Ajl reminds us, not the same as ecosocialism. Accordingly, Ajl offers a compellingly simple provocation: if all of these visions are impossible in the current political climate, why not fight for the more radical vision of the future that everyone on earth deserves?  

A People’s Green New Deal has given us an opportunity to think with Ajl about the current state of aspirational, state-centered green politics, and to reflect on the supposed “pragmatism that drives the most prominent GND legislative agendas. Ultimately, pragmatism is a question of political strategy: is it better (more pragmatic) to embrace a liberal social democratic horizon in order to build a base of support in the Northern core? Or is it better to push even harder from below and to the left, with visions centered by the climate politics of the Global South? Which people should the people’s climate movement mobilize, fight for, and center? If the answer is “everyone,” Ajl argues, then any blueprints for a “green future” must necessarily include the dismantling of uneven development, uneven exchange, and uneven climate catastrophe, full stop. Here we suspect that many of those whom Ajl targets for critique would agree, but the likely rejoinder is: how can we “push harder” if we have so little power in the first place? Again, the question comes down to strategy.

For Ajl, the problem with green social democracy is that it is at once impossible and boring.

Are left-leaning platforms that envision a socially and environmentally just Keynesianism a means of nudging the “Overton window” of sentiment in the global North away from self-serving, business-as-usual climate denialism? Are these truly, as their adherents seem to hope, the sorts of “non-reformist reforms” proposed by the French ecosocialist André Gorz? Or are they simply reformist reforms, meant to incrementally improve without fundamentally transforming underlying systems of power, privilege, extraction, and ecocide? Ajl squarely situates himself with the latter position. For Ajl, the problem with green social democracy is that it is at once impossible and boring. This kind of pragmatism limits our political imagination instead of opening up new horizons of possibility that galvanize real movement.

In order to build effective political support, GND advocates propose a “big tent strategy” based on the promise of green capitalism (promising “green jobs” and a boost to the economy).  This vision fails to challenge, or even name, the unevenness that is necessary to sustain what has been termed the “imperial mode of living” of resource-intensive consumerism for predominantly Global North inhabitants. The result is a politics of “non-disruptive disruptions” that looks to techno-fixes that promise to change everything without changing anything at all. Implicit in the big tent strategy is a promise that the Global North can continue to benefit from uneven exchange and development, but in greener and cleaner ways. Here, Ajl draws upon classic theorists of dependency like Samir Amin, Walter Rodney, Amílcar Cabral, Walter Mignolo, Ali Kadri, along with more recent theorists like Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik, in centering ideas of “colonial drain” and unequal environmental exchange. This body of work illuminates how the integration of formerly colonized countries into the global capitalist economy positions them as appendages to imperial countries like the United States and United Kingdom through a systematic and ongoing drain of surplus. Left to accommodate environmental and economic harms –– including waste, seepage, exploitation, and exhaustion –– these countries are inevitably left out of any “deal” marketed as green, progressive, or environmentally sustainable. (For more discussion of this intervention see “A People’s Green New Deal Symposium” including A People’s Green New Deal – An Exercise in Just Knowledge Production, by Aravind Sakshi, Beyond Green Restoration: An Eco-Socialist GND, by Güney Işıkara, and Debunking the “Eco-Fortress Nationalism” of the AOC/Markey Green New Deal, by Sheetal Chhabria.)

In addition to being consistently inadequate at addressing the causes of climate change, Ajl sees in this so-called pragmatism an implicit defense of the ways in which petrocultures have shaped consumer desires in the Global North. Pragmatism, he writes, is “the watchword of reaction and a talisman of oppression … a cipher for identifying sacrificial victims for a great society that is only capacious enough to hold so many” (12). The pragmatic stance says: we have to build a broad base of support amongst the Northern electorate for a domestic environmental agenda that would eventually trickle down to address the uneven exchanges of the global energy system. Directly challenging imperialist relations and privileges, however, is a non-starter in the halls of Northern power. This is precisely the problem that such pragmatism risks.

So what might this mean for another possible approach, or means of engaging with viable and necessary Green New Deals? If social democratic pragmatism is a problem, then what is a more effective path forward? A People’s Green New Deal argues that left climate politics would benefit from a more robust conjunctural analysis that remains attentive to the uneven positions that various movement actors find themselves occupying, and to develop revolutionary strategy accordingly. While we are not quite sure Ajl’s work delivers on this loftier challenge of revolutionary strategy (and here we point readers to our companion review by Vijay Kolinjivadi for some examples), he does provide some incredibly important pieces of a broader, conjunctural analysis, and how it might suggest important shifts in left climate politics. Although we feel that the question of revolutionary strategy – beyond rejecting big tent pragmatism and standing in solidarity with third world eco-socialism – stands to to be further elaborated, we focus on what the book successfully contributes to these discussions in what follows.

Social democratic pragmatism or climate imperialism?

Ajl’s critique of political pragmatism is leveled most sharply at advocates for social democratic GND agendas that operate within existing networks of power, influence, and money to promote certain green futures while sidelining others. He is unimpressed with how these proposals gesture to “frontline communities” (evidenced in even those most progressive of GND proposals) while leaving imperial relations unchallenged. As Ajl writes, “‘Frontline and vulnerable communities’ are not classes. They are clay-like concepts easily molded into the framework of capitalist diversity efforts… where they will be hardened into decoration on the imperial agenda” (83).  His major example, the HR-109 legislation introduced by AOC-Markey in 2019, expresses concern for the legislation’s impact upon frontline and vulnerable communities, but never extends an invitation to these communities to play any substantive role in planning and envisioning their own green futures. Such concern disregards self-determination and sovereignty for these communities.  

We need an internationalism built upon decentering the imperial core, not reconstituting its dominance in greener ways.

Against this “pragmatism,” a truly radical – or a Peoples’ – Green New Deal must be premised upon the dismantling of the U.S. military and must address the “sovereignty deficit” that has stripped peripheral nations of any meaningful sense of self-determination. Instead of a trickle-down internationalism, in which core nations provide new green technologies on their own terms (as we’ve seen with COVID vaccines), we need an internationalism built upon decentering the imperial core, not reconstituting its dominance in greener ways. This is why Ajl suggests a strategic engagement with calls for imperial countries in the Global North (chiefly the United States and the European Union) to take “personal responsibility” in paying back their global climate debt, which includes trillions upon trillions owed for the cheap extraction of energetic and material resources over the past several centuries. As Ajl writes, “it is not enough to acknowledge that the US is disproportionately culpable” if such an acknowledgement “isn’t followed up with explicit efforts to make good on climate debt” (85). Climate debt, ecological debt, and sovereignty debt – or as Ajl terms it, the “sovereignty deficit” – directly address the core problem of global capitalist extraction, and therefore the actual problems at the root of the climate catastrophe. 

Here Ajl draws something of a line in the sand, arguing that decarceration, decolonization, and abolition are foundational blocks of any viable “green” future. We take these as crucial provocations for the climate left: what does it mean to not simply support decarceration, decolonization, and abolition, but to weave these political horizons into the very fabric of our climate politics? This is precisely the point made by the Red Nation in their powerful rejoinder to GND politics. To put this into terms of revolutionary strategy: vague gestures of support for and deference to “front line communities” don’t build the popular sovereignty needed to empower the most important transformations that GNDs promise to achieve.     

Decolonization, decarceration, demilitarization, abolition – these are all big ideas that still need to be fleshed out with details, including the social and technological specifics of when, where, and how to move towards such liberatory horizons. In other words, what are the truly “non-reformist reforms” that take us down these paths, which might oppose an assimilitive reformism more likely to protect the status quo than to subvert it? These are large, movement-defining questions, and while Ajl helps frame their importance, he doesn’t evenly deliver on concrete visions moving towards their realization. However, where Ajl’s text – and overall work – most succeeds is in addressing the question of technology.

Agroecology: A sociotechnical blueprint against climate imperialism 

Throughout his “Planet of Fields” chapter, Ajl reminds us that agroecology is a technologically sophisticated way of repairing human and nonhuman relations. His insistence on emphasizing the technological sophistication and sufficiency of agroecology is precisely a gesture along these lines – and one that he expertly pulls off, here and throughout his work. This is where we think Ajl’s voice matters most in global climate debates. Agroecology is not just a make-do set of vernaculars for the periphery. It is a robust and diverse platform of land management and food production practices that can – in a much more “feasible” or “pragmatic” way – take us far down the path of environmental rationality on a planetary scale. It is not smart “for them.” It is just smart. It is smarter. It is the cutting edge.

Technological change is a pre-occupation of most GND visions and debates: should we go for solar, wind or nuclear power? Electric vehicles or clean biofuels? Not only are most debates within GND discourses centered on technology, they are often preoccupied with questions of energy production. Ajl strongly critiques the current discourse around energy transitions, which remain mired in what he labels “ecomodernism.” Ecomodernism is not Ajl’s term, but a platform with roots in ecological modernization theory that has been resuscitated by the Breakthrough Institute’s extended network. Such ecomodernists create a strawman opponent of an antiquated left environmentalism that they paint as anti-technological and therefore out of step with progress, modernity, and everything that has made civilizational advance so bountiful. Their vision of a bright green future purports to use “humanity’s extraordinary powers in service of creating a good Anthropocene.” Ajl, instead, follows many decolonial and Marxist thinkers who have made abundantly clear that modernity and coloniality are two sides of the same coin. Modernity and coloniality cannot be decoupled because they are mutually constitutive. 

Ajl’s critique of GND ecomodernisms has to do with their liberal sense of internationalism, which we would call a trickle-down green politics. This kind of internationalism sidelines questions of self-determination and sovereignty, conceiving of internationalism in such a way that situates the Global North in a leading position. For many GND ecomodernists, internationalism is predicated upon tech transfers from north to south, with the assumption that the halls of innovation and entrepreneurship in the developed world will have all the solutions. The problem however, is that these halls of innovation are providing solutions for a lifestyle that is itself the problem. Or in Ajl’s words, “the good life in the North … [has] been based on the bad life in the South” (54). The primary focus lies in protecting a highly energetic and resource-intensive “good life” enjoyed by a minority in the global North, promising to “green” these lifestyles and the industrial base they depend upon, and eventually share this green developmentalism with the rest of the planet. 

The goal of a peoples’ GND should not be to accept and perpetuate capitalist imperialism in more sustainable ways, but to diagnose it as a core aspect of the crisis and to confront it accordingly. This means re-orienting our sociotechnical imaginaries away from those entrepreneurial innovators trying to sell us green capitalist lifestyles, and towards a different kind of innovation rooted in a vibrant and sustainable world of many worlds. 

Ajl’s turn towards agroecology is an effort to call attention to the assumptions of developmentalism that still linger in progressive GND programs. He mentions, for example, how Cuba has shown how agroecological techniques ranging from vermiculture, soil conservation, innovation of intercropping designs, seed saving, recovery of local varieties, participatory plant breeding, and the improvement of local animal feeds and pastures have helped to boost food production in a manner that is nonetheless more energy efficient and sustainable. Here, Ajl shifts focus from energy to food, arguing that any truly radical GND proposal must begin with the foodways and food needs of the Global South, as opposed to starting with the food desires of the global elite. A People’s Green New Deal, then, must include the dismantling or nationalization of agricultural corporations like Monsanto, as well as planetary agrarian reform, including the breaking up of big farms and the providing of individualized farming space for small-scale farmers. Such plans would include introducing parity pricing, and providing green transition subsidies and placing public investment in infrastructures that can localize food systems.

Ajl’s turn towards agroecology is an effort to call attention to the assumptions of developmentalism that still linger in progressive GND programs.

To illustrate this point, Ajl takes to task questions of meat production, and criticizes what he sees as a false dichotomy between, on the one hand, an ecomodernist excitement about lab-grown meat, and on the other hand, advocacy for global veganism. Ajl is dissatisfied with both, and reminds us that the true problem is not animal-derived proteins, but the environmentally devastating (and morally bankrupt) ways that animals are industrially bred and slaughtered. Such a view “obscures the ecological, political, and social differences between Sahelian herders, Kansan artisanal animal husbandrymen practicing intensive rotational grazing, and those sitting atop pyramidal monopoly-capitalist cow plantations” (136). The category of meat is over-simplified in the climate discourse of the global North, which fails to accept the ways that meat can function sustainably outside of industrial agriculture.

Such conceptual blockages are due to the predominance of ecomodernist narratives which center development in calls to develop the underdeveloped world, or even to conserve or “rewild” the world from the top down. Take, for example, calls for “half-earth socialism” and mandated global veganism from environmentalists like Troy Vettese, which ignore the fact that low-impact livestock agriculture across the global south uses rangelands and pastoral agriculture to support landscape protection and carbon sequestration. The problem is that such policies purport to further the imperialist relationship between developed and underdeveloped countries to impose a global fix that keeps imperialist dynamics intact. Worse, they do not acknowledge that some of the most environmentally sustainable practices already exist within low-impact agricultural systems. 

In this regard, lab meat and agroecology are two totally different sociotechnical possibilities addressing two totally different sociotechnical questions. They are interrelated, of course, but for the former it is a question of discovering new ways to feed (quite literally) imperial desires, and for the other it is about supporting and expanding existing ways of feeding the global majority. For Ajl, if we are to imagine an approach to climate politics coming from below and to the left, then it’s the latter, as opposed to the former, that needs to be centered.

From agroecology to food sovereignty: Ecological and social resilience through land reform and “Third World ecosocialism”

Agroecology is not new at all, and if implemented in the North, could entail silvopasturing (or integrating trees into pasture systems), planting forage under trees, alley cropping (which inserts trees into fields), windbreaks, riparian and upland buffers, and forest farming, which could absorb around eleven percent of 2019 carbon emissions. Lab meat, by contrast, is a perfect example of the inefficiency and environmental harm of “green” capitalist production, because it takes more energy to create artificial meat than it would to support agroecological pasture farming.

As many have pointed out, sociotechnical know-how matters, but it also matters where we look for it and who we empower as experts. That is both a function of sovereignty – in terms of land, labor, and resources – as well as in terms of knowledge and technocratic coordination. Instead of just a green technology transfer – from north to south – there needs to be reciprocal dialogues and transfers. Here Ajl pushes beyond some of the more radical GND proposals to envision new forms of abundance that are less dependent on resource-intensive patterns of production and consumption. Agroecology is one such form of abundance, where “animals can and should be a part of landscape management, helping store CO2 in soil, and enriching it and making it more resilient” (137). 

 This is why land reform takes such a central position in Ajl’s thought. It is what matters fundamentally to so many people on the front lines of the climate crisis, and why land back, reparations, and demilitarization are so important – and so intimately linked to self determination and food sovereignty. Food sovereignty, based upon radical land-to-tiller agrarian reforms, is “the cornerstone for Third World eco-socialism” (139). This is where Ajl turns back to the national question that decolonial thinkers were grappling with in the mid 20th century in reminding us that this question has not been answered and remains central today. In short, the climate question is still a colonial-imperialist question. As such, combating climate change means allowing for the ecological and social resilience that thinkers like Kyle Whyte call for in a true decolonial perspective of climate justice. 

So what might it actually mean to locate the technological vanguard in the countryside of the global south? What does it look like when innovation is centered by rural agronomy as opposed to venture capital? To what extent do we really need more technofutures arising from the imperial core that have largely contributed to dominant understandings of viable and liveable futures? This is the medicine Ajl prescribes to the Northern climate movement. 

Empowering, centering, and supporting the people and movements of the global periphery requires granting them power and autonomy to develop – on their own terms – and to give them resources to lead us into a socio-technical future that is neither new nor old (that’s a false distinction on a liberal timeline of progress) but simply otherwise. That “otherwise” is peaceful/anti-imperial, it is socialist/anti-capitalist, it is regionalized and rationalized with planetarily democratic input for the coordination and distribution of resources. This will only happen by fighting for and supporting sovereignty, self-determination, and national liberation via the acknowledgement of sovereignty deficits and ecosocialist reparations. 

The Cochabamba Agreement: A blueprint for our planetary future

Drawing upon decades of decolonial liberation movements, Ajl urges us to support “a movement of movements” of sovereignty struggles against the imperial core. He reminds us of the Cochabamba agreement, an international climate accord from below and far to the left of what is currently circulating as the social democratic vanguard of climate politics. The 2010 Cochabamba Agreement, he writes, gives us the “planks of a southern platform for ecological revolution” that are “absent or underemphasized in most northern Green New Deals” (11).  It shows how agrarian reform, combined with decolonial and national liberation struggles in Bolivia, demanded wide-ranging payments from the North to the South alongside a radical climate agenda. 

As Ajl suggests, it may not be mere accident or oversight that this climate accord has been jettisoned for language built around the nostalgic concept of an early 20th century social democratic policy platform in the industrialized North. Ajl also points to the Red Nation’s Red Deal, which shifts questions of social democracy to questions of broken treaties and the need to fight for sovereignty for the dispossessed nations of this world. All of these interventions, from Ajl, Cochabamba, and the Red Nation, center the “national question” and decolonial/anti-imperial politics, as the crux of climate politics. Here, the three elements of ecological debt, demilitarization, and struggles against settler-colonialism meet in places like the “Land Back” movement. A new land-tenure regime and swift changes in land management that center (rather than pay lip service to) Indigenous sociotechnical knowledge are, for Ajl, the shift which “makes the world big enough for all of us” (162). 

Ultimately, A People’s Green New Deal asks: should an ecosocialist Green New Deal govern capitalism or destroy it? In answering this question, Ajl’s book turns notions of social democratic liberalism – whether self-proclaimed eco-socialist or otherwise – on their heads. As he warns, “pragmatism and realism can become firehoses dousing in despair the flames of revolutionary hope” (4). Ajl argues that both should be dismissed as ideological counterinsurgency against those who not merely hope for, but need, a better world. 

We’d like to thank Rut Elliot Blomqvist for helpful suggestions on this piece.

Jesse Goldstein is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University and the Associate Director of VCU’s Humanities Research Center. His book, Planetary Improvement, explores the unrealistic prospects of entrepreneurial solutions solving the climate crisis. His new work looks critically at ways that student creativity is narrowly supported and channeled in the entrepreneurial university.

Natalie Suzelis is an Assistant Professor of Literature at Antioch College and Associate Faculty with the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Her work synthesizes environmental and economic history with cultural theory in order to investigate how elements of capitalist culture are negotiated in literature. Her work has been published in Shakespeare Studies, Mediations, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1800, and Law, Culture, and Humanities.

To organize in times of crisis, we need to connect the dots of global resistance against Imperialism

Sallye Davis (organizer and mother of Angela Davis), Ann Bishop, Alimenta Bishop, and New Jewel movement leader Maurice Bishop, Grenada, 1982. Photo from The House on Coco Road, directed by Damani Baker, Array Films.

by Corinna Mullin and Azadeh Shahshahani

Writing in the aftermath of the US-led overthrow of the People’s Revolutionary Government of Grenada, the inimitable Audre Lorde lamented the absence of a strong anti-imperialist movement in her seminal essay “Grenada Revisited.” Lorde identified two main factors to explain the dearth of resistance to the blatant intervention by the US in a sovereign state’s internal affairs: 1. a deliberately confused public sphere as “doublethink has come home to scramble our brains and blanket our protest,” and 2. a desensitized “[white] america whose moral & ethical fiber is weakened by racism as thoroughly as wood is weakened by dry rot.” The years following the 1983 invasion of Grenada have witnessed a continuation, and in many ways, deepening, of both: the racism that underpins the violent dispossession to which marginalized communities at ‘home’ and ‘abroad’ are subjected, coupled with the discursive infrastructure of a capitalist dominated media and public sphere designed to obscure and normalize this dispossession as well as to delegitimize resistance.

We currently face a combined economic, ecological and health crisis that is in many ways a product of the forms of exploitation and dispossession that Lorde identified in her essay, making it more vital than ever to draw connections in our analysis of and resistance to racial capitalism and Imperialism. Rob Wallace has demonstrated the linkages between capitalist modes of agriculture and the ecological transformations that have enabled the spread of “the most virulent and infectious phenotypes” of pathogens such as those that resulted in the coronavirus.

These processes have accelerated in the neoliberal era, spurred on by imperialist circuits of finance capital whose penetration of the Global South was enabled by the removal of “restrictions on the global flows of commodities and capital.” Neoliberalism has entailed a set of social and economic policies rolled out over the past five decades as a response to the crises of racial capitalism, designed to reverse even limited post-Depression working class gains and redistribute wealth upwards. Neoliberal policies including repeated tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, the deregulation of various sectors of the economy (including finance, telecommunication, energy, etc.), and the marketization and privatization of public services (including in the domains of education, social welfare, prisons, etc.) resulted in deindustrialization and the dismantlement of many public institutions that would otherwise have helped to mitigate the current crisis, including health care. The state’s “organized abandonment” was accompanied by a retrenching of its repressive apparatuses, including prisons, borders, and police—or the state’s “organized violence” in the words of Ruth Gilmore.  This violence has targeted with criminalization the very Black, Brown, Indigenous, working class, poor and other marginalized and racialized communities who were the most impacted by neoliberal restructuring, extending already existing forms of exploitation, dispossession and exclusion in capitalist core states.

Many of the neoliberal policies behind the restructuring of the Global North’s welfare state were originally tested on—and resisted in—the periphery.

Many of the neoliberal policies behind the restructuring of the Global North’s welfare state were originally tested on—and resisted in—the periphery, via imperialist institutions like the IMF (International Monetary Fund), the World Bank, and the EU. As part of the attack on the post-independence assertion of Global South sovereignty, structural adjustment programs via enforced spending cuts and privatization engendered state disinvestment in public goods, contributing to the degradation of public institutions, including public health. They have also enforced capitalist patent regimes that limit these states’ abilities to provide affordable and accessible medicine to their populations, ensuring that the Global North benefits from the “monopoly rent…[and] an almost exclusive control of the world market of health.” Neocolonial debt further hinders Global South public health by diverting already limited state resources away from funding health care systems to servicing public debt. Similar to developments in the Global North, one of the few sectors that witnessed an increase in spending during the neocolonial assault on the state in the Global South were the repressive security institutions, also contributing the accumulation of public debt. This neoliberal restructuring combines with the colonial-capitalist assault on Global South ecologies and the destruction of imperialist wars and militarism, to produce “wasted lives”—contributing to an expansion of the “global reserve army of labor,” superexploitation of Global South labor and surplus value extraction.

While scholars like David Harvey argue that Imperialism is no longer useful as an analytic category, a look at any number of socio-economic indicators statistically mapped out onto an image of the globe makes clear that the north-south cleavage is still salient when it comes to patterns of accumulation and dispossession. Whether we look at it through the lens of public health, monopoly finance capital, global commodity chains, labor exploitation, unequal exchange, sanctions, climate disaster, or military interventions—there is a stark geographic dimension to how power is divided and exercised across the globe. As in the past, global inequalities today are also reflected and intimately connected to those within the metropole. In the current context, it is poor, undocumented, immigrant, Black and Brown communities hit the hardest by crisis. Not only in terms of being more susceptible to contracting and dying from the coronavirus, as a result of historical legacies of slavery and ongoing structural racism, resulting in a lack of access to adequate health care, nutrition and housing, as well as contributing to conditions as well as often limited capacity to “social distance,” but also because of the uneven impact of its socio-economic reverberations, including loss of employment and housing, as well as being subjected to state violence and surveillance as part of the state’s increasingly securitized response.

Similar to the Granada intervention conjuncture so incisively dissected by Lorde, the current moment has also laid bare the interconnections between the Imperialism and racial capitalism. Yet we still falling far short of the kind of political mobilization required, with the parallel analytical phenomenon that some interpretations of Imperialism have been stretched so thin that the concept has lost much of its meaning and urgency. Though there may be several factors that can account for this, central among them is what Lorde, referencing George Orwell, identified as “doublethink.” This refers to a deliberate and systematic politics of confusion that emerged in the late/post-Cold War period, providing a discursive cover for the neoliberal counter-revolution against post-colonial Global South sovereignty. This cover operates through several discursive mechanisms, including through the evasion and distortion of history to disrupt and reverse otherwise obvious connections between causes (settler-colonialism, slavery, racial capitalism, Imperialism) and effects (underdevelopment, de-development, inequality, dispossession). This doublethink equates imperialist violence with the responses it engenders, flattening out different forms of state power, (e.g. by conflating neoliberal and imperially aligned states such as Colombia and Peru with “Pink tide” governments such as Bolivia and Ecuador that have sought to nationalize resources and redistribute wealth, support the struggles of workers and Indigenous communities, and challenge imperialist geopolitical alignments, repeatedly referring to the latter as “authoritarian”). It also normalizes imperialist violence through discursive formations such as the ‘democratization’, ‘humanitarianism’, ‘development’, ‘war on terror’, ‘green transition’, and sets limits on what we are able to imagine in terms of liberation (e.g. whether or not international agreements can be broken and debt erased, regional integration, redistribution, ending private property regimes and reclaiming the commons). It is why for so many people it is “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

Faced with this combined health-economic-ecological crisis, there is a renewed urgency to demystify and contest this politics of confusion by strengthening our anti-imperialist organizing. Just as we build solidarity through mutual aid in our communities to fill the gaps- as well as address root causes– left by the neoliberal, racial capitalist state, we must extend our solidarity to support mutual aid efforts in the Global South, where similar and much more severe gaps in the ability of the state to protect people in the face of coronavirus are intimately connected to US Imperialism. These include economic warfare against countries like Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela, to the deepening and expansive tentacles of US military projection across the African continent through the US Africa Command (AFRICOM), including “46 various forms of U.S. bases” and other military interventions designed, in the words of the former deputy of AFRICOM himself to “Protec[t] the free flow of natural resources from Africa to the global market,” and including past and ongoing US directed or backed invasions, bombings, blockades, occupations, covert destabilization military operations and coups in places like Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Libya, Bolivia and Venezuela.

Conceptualizing Imperialism

At its base, Imperialism is a system of domination that blocks real self-determination for states and peoples. It is about externally determining and imposing, often together with the collaboration of elements of a domestic elite, particular modes of industrialization, socio-political forms of governance and border-making/border practices that facilitate labor exploitation and surplus drain in the Global South for the benefit of (largely Global North/western) capital. It is about blocking alternative ways of imagining and pursuing development, value, and of living with one another and with the Earth. The imperialist aim is to obstruct the pursuit of alternative socio-political-economic projects (and sabotage extant ones) that threaten capitalist power. As Ali Kadri reminds us, the state-led developmentalist projects of the post-independence era implemented across West Asia and Africa “did not fail on their own”; it was “implicit and explicit” forms of Imperialism “that shut them down.”

Imperialism is about blocking alternative ways of imagining and pursuing development, value, and of living with one another and with the Earth.

Imperialism is also always about violence. There is the structural violence that results from what Walter Rodney described as the “paradox” of underdevelopment, where “[m]any parts of the world that are naturally rich are actually poor.” There is also, of course, the material violence. Imperialism is backed up by the threat and often actual shock and awe of military might. We are all too familiar with the long list and typology of imperialist interventions, which include: the invasions, occupations and other forms of imperialist (largely US/French/British/Germany led)-military action witnessed over the past century in places from Vietnam to Iraq, North Korea to Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Chile, Syria and Mali to imperialist backed coups against leftist and/or nationalist governments across Africa and the Americas. Through destabilization, destruction, and currency devaluation, wars and occupations enable numerous forms of extraction and exploitation of natural and human resources. In that sense, they are primary mechanisms of “surplus value and power creation.” This is true not only, as Ali Kadri shows us, in the immediate aftermath of violence, but for years following, as they produce the socio-economic conditions of “underdevelopment” that enable Global North accumulation.

Returning to Grenada, Lorde pointed to the outcome (and aim) of the US invasion: “Ministries are silent. The state farms are at a standstill. The cooperatives are suspended…On the day after the invasion, unemployment was back up to 35 percent. A cheap, acquiescent labor pool is the delight of supply side economics.”

Imperialist mechanisms

Counted among the list of imperialist interventions are the 1,000 military bases and installations the US operates/and or controls across the globe, which have aided in the funding of death squads, coups, and other covert operations. This number far surpasses that of foreign military bases maintained by any other state in the world. There are also the more subtle forms of military domination and imperialist induced vulnerability that come from state dependence on US/European weapons and surveillance systems, training, as well as military “cooperation” with joint military operations, wherein the US outsources risky ventures to Global South “partners.”

While much is made of Russia and China as competing powers for global hegemony, it is telling that the US spends more on “national defense” than the other countries included on the list of top 8 military spenders combined

The US dominated military-industrial-complex continues to be one of the most visible mechanisms of Imperialism today. While much is made of Russia and China as competing powers for global hegemony, it is telling that the US spends more on “national defense” than the other countries included on the list of top 8 military spenders combined (including France, United Kingdom, Germany, India, Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia).  The US dominated arms market also perpetuates financialization of the global capitalist economy as the top arms dealers are all publicly traded. The US continues to dominate with 42 of the Top 100 listed arms companies based in the United States. The speculative role of arms capital was once more on display as major US arms companies saw their stock prices jump following the Trump administration’s assassination of the leader of Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Qassem Soleimani in January of this year In supplying their arms to the Global South, these merchants of death not only provide the conditions to alienate citizens from their states, but also alienate Global South states from one another as they find themselves caught up in conflicts that are not of their own making, nor in their own interest.

Perhaps even more pervasive than militarism, economic warfare is one of the most destructive forms of imperialist intervention. Currently, a third of humanity is impacted by US sanctions. Sanctions are a way of disciplining Global South self-determination, as is so clearly the case in Zimbabwe where sanctions first adopted in 2001 were designed to punish the government for its extensive land reform program. Not only do sanctions by design “cause untold death and devastation,” a reality laid bare in the current health crisis, but also, as Lauren Smith demonstrates, “economic sanctions serve to justify and conceal theft, through asset freezes and seizures, at a rate only previously accomplished through invasion and occupation.” US sanctions trigger currency devaluation, inflation, increased unemployment, prices and access to food, power, and industrial equipment, and, of course, medicine. In other words, sanctions are a neocolonial tool designed to “prevent countries from setting in place any form of economic development.”

Iran has been the target of one of the most significant and consistent US sanctions regimes, a punishment for asserting its sovereignty with the 1979 Iranian revolution. Though lifted for a short time following the 2015 nuclear deal, Trump’s re-imposition and expansion of sanctions have forced the Iranian economy to contract by 9.3 percent in 2019.  To convey a sense of the scale of the impact that the US enforced severing of Iran from the international financial system has had on the Iranian economy, Kevin Cashman and Cavan Kharrazian explain that it would be the equivalent to a 16 percent cut in the US federal budget, or $521 billion in 2018. With at least 58,226 cases of the coronavirus and at least 3,603 deaths recorded since the outbreak, there is no doubt that US sanctions have made it much harder to tackle the pandemic. The country is facing shortages of respiratory-assistance devices and basic medical equipment, such as gloves and masks.  With the sanctions impeding Iran’s ability to respond to the health crisis it is facing, the aims of the US’ economic warfare on the country are rendered even more apparent: destabilization and death.

In Venezuela, even before the coronavirus outbreak, a report by the Center for Economic and Policy research demonstrated a 31% increase in mortality in the country after the 2017 round of US imposed sanctions, causing an increase of 40,000 deaths in the country. The most recent ramping up of imperialist aggression towards Venezuela in the form of increased sanctions, the deployment of navy ships towards the country and the placement of a $15 million-dollar bounty on the head of President Nicolas Maduro, have all contributed to undermining Venezuela’s ability to confront the coronavirus, and will undoubtedly result in even more deaths. To add insult to injury, US Imperialism has created both the conditions in which Iran and Venezuela have been forced to turn to the IMF for emergency funds to confront the coronavirus as well as the reason for which the IMF continues to block these countries from accessing needed funds.

US Imperialism has created both the conditions in which Iran and Venezuela have been forced to turn to the IMF for emergency funds to confront the coronavirus as well as the reason for which the IMF continues to block these countries from accessing needed funds.

Sanctions are not only deadly in the sense of blocking access to the medicine, food and finance required by states to provide basic welfare for their population, but also in denying and distorting capital flows and economic transactions, and in enabling the investment of seized assets in Global North banks. They are a major mode of Global South-to-North wealth drain. As demonstrated by a recent report, the U.S. economic blockade has caused over US $138.8 billion in losses to Cuba since the 1960s. Of course, not everyone in the Global North benefits from this wealth drain. As with other examples of imperialist intervention, the inequalities of racial capitalism are in fact exacerbated by sanctions as an economy built on “plunder” is by design one that exploits, dispossesses and wastes lives.

Connecting the dots between racial capitalism and Imperialism

The above list of imperialist economic interventions includes debt colonialism, currency manipulations, structural adjustment programs, “free trade” deals, and other forms of economic intervention that block Global South development and facilitate Global South wealth drain and Global North accumulation. By dehumanizing, devaluing, and exploiting Global South lives and livelihoods, Imperialism perpetuates white supremacy both within the US and across what W.E.B. Du Bois described as the “global color line.” For Lorde, the seeming indifference of the US public to the imperialist violence committed against Grenada could only be grasped by understanding how “white america has been well-schooled in the dehumanization of Black people” and how such socialization enables accumulation through dispossession under racial capitalism.

By dehumanizing, devaluing, and exploiting Global South lives and livelihoods, Imperialism perpetuates global white supremacy both within the US and across what W.E.B. Du Bois described as the “global color line.”

The racialized forms of accumulation underpinning capitalism have always been international — from the foundational role of slavery and the dispossession of Indigenous lands and polities to the current formations and relations of power underpinning the globalized and hierarchically organized and racialized circuits of trade and production. These circuits of trade and production are kept in place by imperialist states and the multilateral institutions they dominate, from the IMF/World Bank to NATO, often including different organs of the UN and international law. These same interests, institutions, policies, and practices not only act outward to impact people around the world, but are responsible for criminalizing, exploiting and dispossessing Indigenous, migrant, Black, Brown, undocumented, and poor communities in the US itself.  Trump’s framing of Covid-19 as the “Chinese virus,” a framing that was readily echoed by a mainstream media and public sphere long schooled in anti-Asian racism and the (neo)colonial tradition of deploying “health and medical discourses [to] further racist projects of excluding and eliminating those deemed undesirable,” is a reminder of Imperialism’s and racial capitalism’s shared discursive infrastructure.

Resisting Imperialism

Both this global domination and the resistance to it have always been international. From early forms of radical Black internationalism, including such luminaries as W.E.B. Dubois, Claudia Jones, Paul Robeson, Kwame Nkrumah, Frantz Fanon and Angela Davis, to organizations like the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, the International African Service Bureau, and the Black Panthers, internationalism was an important base of struggles against colonial regimes and white supremacy. There is also the long tradition of what Nick Estes describes “Indigenous internationalism,” through which Indigenous peoples have “imagin[ed] themselves as part of Third World struggles and ideologies, and entirely renouncing the Imperialism and exceptionalism of the First World (while still living in it).” Internationalism informed various state initiatives (e.g. the 1955 Bandung Conference, and 1964 UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), as well as early hybrid state-popular forms of solidarity expressed through institutions such as the Cairo based Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization and its “antecedent,” the African Association, and the Tricontinental Conference. Today, the international peasant and ecological movement of Via Campesina coordinates global resistance to the ravages of capitalist agriculture for a food sovereign future, while the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, Black for Palestine and The Red Nation carry forward the mantle of internationalism in the name of anti-colonial solidarity, Palestinian, Native and Black liberation and human emancipation. Much anti-imperialist organizing in the US today centers abolition, pointing to linkages between US interventions “abroad” and repression at “home,” with a focus on “racialized policing and prison systems” as well as connections between the conceptual and material underpinnings of the carceral-police state in the imperial core and the periphery.  The abolition project has assumed a new urgency in the current conjuncture as it is clear that communities targeted by the carceral-police state are the most vulnerable to the current combined crisis.

While the imperialist security state devises new mechanisms of control and capital figures out ways to profit from the crisis, resistance is also mounting. Already existing circuits and networks of solidarity are being mobilized, with organizations like the Red Nation calling for human solidarity “not just to stop the most catastrophic effects of COVID-19, but to end this inhumane and criminal capitalist system once and for all.” Others like Cooperation Jackson are building on the increasing radicalism of labor organizing in the face of the crisis to demand a “democratization of the means of production” as well as a redirection of funds spent on defending and expanding the US empire “to Health Care, Social Services, Universal Basic Income and Greening Public Infrastructure and the Economy.” There are also calls originating from the Global South for broad solidarity with demands for reparations and the cancellation of neocolonial debt. While the US practices public health Imperialism, Cuba is leading the way with its public health Internationalism, providing support to states in the Global South (and even Global North), which are struggling because of limited resources and the consequences of neoliberal cost-cutting of health-services to fight the spread and impact of the coronavirus.

International solidarity derives from the realization that our own liberation — and indeed, our survival — is fundamentally linked to the liberation and survival of the most oppressed people across the globe.

These past and present forms of internationalism have taught us that the struggle against racial capitalism and Imperialism can only succeed if undertaken as a collective. As rising temperatures and sea levels (as well as the rapid spread of the deadly coronavirus) remind us, international solidarity is neither an abstract nor intellectual duty. Rather, it derives from the realization that our own liberation — and indeed, our survival — is fundamentally linked to the liberation and survival of the most oppressed people across the globe. As internationalists, we also have a responsibility to educate ourselves to the greatest extent possible about the popular struggles unfolding in parts of the world where Imperialism is busy at work, in our names, and with our tax dollars. From Algeria, to Haiti, Chile, Ecuador, Lebanon, before the coronavirus health crisis gripped the globe, it seemed the entire world was on fire with popular uprisings resisting the ravages of capitalism and the apparatuses of “organized violence” that are designed to sabotage and manage dissent. Once the virus subsides, these struggles will undoubtedly reconvene with a vengeance, spurred on by the inequalities and injustices exposed and exacerbated by the combined crisis as well as by signaling from imperialist institutions such as the World Bank, which has called on states to “implement structural reforms to help shorten the time to recovery,” that business will continue as usual. Likewise the struggle for Palestinian liberation, where Imperialism and settler-colonialism combine to create the perfectly deadly mix for the unequal spread and impact of coronavirus, accelerating the Israeli project of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population. 

As we have learned from the successes and mistakes of the past, our anti-Imperialism cannot be a one size-fits-all mode of organizing. It must be based on sound analysis of the particular histories, socio-economic contexts, class composition, ideological underpinnings, and political alignments of both states and movements. Yet it always requires that we resist imperialist military and economic intervention as well as the so-called multilateral institutions that facilitate Global South dispossession and wealth drain. It often means standing in solidarity with Global South popular movements as they resist the collusion of their governments in the exploitation, extraction, dispossession and destruction of peoples, lands, and ecologies facilitated by US provisioned arms, training, and diplomatic cover. By virtue of our geographic location in the belly of the beast, we have a special responsibility to resist all attempts by the US and other imperialist actors to sabotage, divert, co-opt, or otherwise limit the will of popular struggles across the Global South. It also requires that we stand in solidarity with those Global South states that are punished for the threat they pose to status quo functioning of global capitalism because of their geopolitical alliances and support for anti-colonial and anti-imperial resistance. Finally, we must be wary of forms of critique that may have the perhaps unintended consequence of turning people away from anti-imperialist organizing at a time when they are needed the most by claiming that those who focus their analysis and organizing on the role of US power, ignore or undermine Global South agency when in fact the principal aim of anti-Imperialism is precisely to support the building of a context in which meaningful Global South self-determination can be realized. At a time when so much is at stake, we must be as careful as possible to ensure our analyses do not reproduce and reinforce imperialist discourses and power relations.

It is the working class, poor, racialized and criminalized communities both in the Global North and South who suffer the most and who are also at the forefront of resistance.

As we confront these interlocking health-economic-ecological crises, we must remember that it is the working class, poor, racialized and criminalized communities both in the Global North and South who suffer the most and who are also at the forefront of resistance. True liberation and survival—depends upon centering the needs, struggles and collective leadership of the most vulnerable among us. To do so requires that we continue building on the analysis and praxis of those Internationalists who have come before us. They have shown us that the best antidote to the politics of confusion is a politics that connect the dots between the political-economic systems of human and ecological domination that continue to exploit, dispossess, and kill us.

After a commenter’s feedback, some corrections have been made on the history of Grenada’s revolution.

The authors would like to thank the editors of Uneven Earth, including Natalie Suzelis and Vijay Kolinjivadi, for their extensive and insightful edits and suggestions, as well as Max Ajl and Setareh Ghandehari for their close readings of the article and feedback. They would also like to thank Zainab Khan, Ramin Zareian, and Chris Tidwell for their research help with the sanctions section of this article.

Corinna Mullin is an adjunct professor at the New School and John Jay College (CUNY) and researches on Imperialism, capitalism and the politics/political economy of Global South security states; she tweets @MullinCorinna.

Azadeh Shahshahani is Legal & Advocacy Director at Project South and a past president of the National Lawyers Guild; she tweets @ashahshahani.

The migration crisis and the imperial mode of living

Tourists on a cruise ship docked at Valletta, Malta. Source: Flickr.

by Miriam Lang

We are currently facing the most severe migration crisis in history. In Europe, the debate on how to tackle the root causes of migration, including forced migration, happens mainly amongst established political actors such as political parties, state institutions, and large international NGOs. This debate focuses on wars, catastrophes, arms trade, and terror, which are all framed as a state of emergency.

For these actors, it is difficult to find practical, immediate solutions to the problem, because this would require addressing the root causes of those wars, going against the immediate interests of European states and international organizations. In consequence, these actors propose “development aid“ as the panacea to address root causes of migration.This aid is then tied to bilateral agreements with Arabic or African countries to prevent migration from occurring in the first place, or which make the deportation  of migrants from Europe to their country of origin easier. Left-leaning critical migration researchers rightly critique this approach for misusing development co-operation as a tool for migration management.

One common response on the left is to, on the one hand, highlight the hypocrisy of trying to solve the crisis through development aid while continuing to drive these crises through arms deals and Western involvement in regional wars, and, on the other hand, framing the migrant crisis in terms of the right to free movement and the human rights of migrants.

Addressing the refugee crisis requires questioning the dominant notions of what it means to live a good life, to think global when it comes to social welfare

But this responds to only one dimension of a broader civilizational crisis. Anti-racist and migrant justice movements should not focus solely on issues of human mobility rights, the failure or even adverse effects of development aid, or Western military involvements. They also need to question the colonial division of nature and labor and what has been called the ‘imperial mode of living.’ Doing so would involve building  new paths of solidarity with societies in the geopolitical Global South. In this sense, addressing the refugee crisis requires questioning the dominant notions of what it means to live a good life, to think global when it comes to social welfare and to link up with movements such as eco-feminism or degrowth. This  could open up new possibilities to address social relegation due to immigration, as they exist in the Global North.

 

It is urgent to fight the accelerated destruction of livelihoods in the Global South

The left  focus on critiquing the mainstream discourse easily leads to an equally politically problematic counter-position, an attitude that principally welcomes migration as something positive without questioning its root causes or the deterioration of living conditions in the Global South. However, can migration be something principally unproblematic that is to be welcomed and even increased? Does the defense of the right to migrate necessarily have to lead us to ignore the manifold coercions that force people to migrate? Must we not, on the contrary, acknowledge the real-life scenarios in the geopolitical Global South and our historical, economic and political contribution to these?

Today, a counter-hegemonic project must necessarily result from a collective construction process between the global North and South, which understands their interdependencies. Of course we have to object when governmental institutions differentiate between “good“ or “legal” refugees on the one hand, and “bad“ or “illegal” refugees on the other hand. However, this should not lead us to ignore global power relations or to paint a naive and euphemistic picture of migration as a natural phenomenon with  positive connotations of  personal choice  and self-determination.

It is just as urgent to fight the accelerated destruction of livelihoods in the Global South, as it is to fight for open borders and dignified living conditions for those who have already fled.

By relying only on a “right to move” framework, we fail to address  what makes this current wave of immigration unique. The decision of a German who prefers to live in the USA is radically different from that of a Nigerian who faces the dangers associated with fleeing and entering the EU undocumented. At the end of 2015, over 65 million persons were displaced globally—a historical record. In light of this situation, it is just as urgent to fight the accelerated destruction of livelihoods in the Global South, as it is to fight for open borders and dignified living conditions for those who have already fled.

As already mentioned, this process is rooted in the international division of labor, and, more specifically, the exploitation of nature (‘resources’) and cheap labor in the Global South to ensure unlimited consumption options in the North. Because of this, the geopolitical South is increasingly faced with  “accumulation by dispossession” as the Marxist geographer David Harvey put it, to satisfy the demand for commodities of the North and new middle and upper classes in some southern countries. This greed for raw materials has led to a massive expansion and acceleration of extractivism: the export of oil, minerals or cash crops is often the only possibility for Southern economies to integrate themselves into the existing world market. As the reports of several human rights organizations show, these processes destroy the material conditions necessary for the lives of increasing numbers of people. The destruction is not only environmental, but often includes the very social fabric of the concerned regions.  People are forced to migrate, and are dispossessed of their social bonds and cultural contexts and knowledges. The so-called ‘green economy’, often mentioned as a ‘clean’ solution to combine ecological concerns with economic growth – for example wind or solar energy production or electric cars – also requires resources such as rare minerals, cobalt, lithium or copper, whose exploitation leads to destructive  social-ecological conflicts elsewhere.

At the same time, the globalized world market ensures that production chains and power relations, and effects like environmental destruction and exploitation which are inscribed in all consumer goods, remain abstract or are systematically obscured. However, those global value chains and power relations constitute a causal link between the imperial mode of living in the geopolitical North and the root causes for flight and migration in the South. In most cases, migration is not a freely-chosen emancipated decision, but a reaction to a specific concurrence of constraints, for example capitalist, gender-specific, ecological and/or (neo)colonial ones. Many of those people who play cat and mouse with the European border-regime today would rather have stayed in their own cultural and socio-economic contexts, if this had been a viable option.

The container port at Fos-Sur-Mer, France.

 

Who has the right to the imperial mode of living?

The imperial mode of living divides the North from the South, because the prosperity of the former is historically rooted in the exploitation of the living environments and (often unpaid) workforce of the latter

The term ‘imperial mode of living’, coined by Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen, does not seek to describe a certain lifestyle practiced by specific social milieus. Rather, it  refers to the hegemonic patterns of production, distribution, and consumption in combination with related cultural imaginaries and subjectivities. These are deeply embedded in the day-to-day practices of the majorities in the global North and increasingly find their ways into the upper and middle classes of countries in the global South.

This mode of living is imperial insofar as it assumes unlimited access to all resources – the space, nature, cheap labor, and sinks of the entire planet – only for a small and privileged minority of the global population. This mode of living is only possible while such unlimited access is secured either by political and judicial means, or by military means and violence. The imperial mode of living connects the geopolitical North and South insofar as it represents their shared hegemonic ideal of a successful and good life under current capitalist conditions, an ideal closely related to the promise of ‘catch-up development’. But at the same time, it divides the North from the South, because the prosperity of the former is historically rooted in the exploitation of the living environments and (often unpaid) workforce of the latter.

Without doubt, open borders and global mobility have to be fought for, especially against nationalist or right-wing environmentalism. But new questions arise around these claims if we consider the global division of labor and nature and the imperial mode of living. Does the claim to open borders and the right to move translate into the right for every human to participate in this mode of living, including those from the global South, if necessary, via migration? This is impossible for two reasons: firstly, while the multidimensional ecological crisis is already threatening the material conditions for the reproduction of life on our planet, the ecological destruction necessary to sustain this mode of living would be intensified. Secondly, because the imperial mode of living always requires an ‘elsewhere’, a foreign space to where exploitation and destruction can be externalized. But when applied to everybody, such an ’elsewhere’ would no longer exist. Without a doubt, many migrants indeed come to Europe hoping to participate in the imperial mode of living, which in most cases reveals to be an illusion, due to the manifold mechanisms of a “selective inclusion“ in place. However, the real question should be: do they, do we, or does anybody at all have the right to a mode of living that exploits and destroys the livelihoods of other people?

New perceptions of the good life

A critical left perspective on refugees and migration that is in solidarity with the global South requires a comprehensive paradigm-shift. The hegemonic discourse of what is considered a good and successful life is based on a number of problematic assumptions: that life as it is today in the Western World represents the highest stage of development of human civilization, and that modifying it would necessarily constitute a loss; that happiness inevitably relies on mass consumption and the accumulation of material goods; that the path of history is one and linear and that other modes of living that are less permeated by capitalist logics and based on different world views are necessarily inferior, backward and underdeveloped on this path; that the advancement of technology is only possible via multinational corporations; that it is the state which has to provide social welfare in a centralized manner; and that – as the idea of socialism in the 20th century suggested – one single, universally applicable master plan is needed before we can initiate change.

Modes of living which require less material consumption do not necessarily mean a loss, but can give rise to genuine enrichment.

In my opinion, the key way to challenge this narrative  lies in the connection between anti-racist struggles for the right to migrate and struggles for a different, less alienated, less accelerated, and individualized life. Such struggles do exist in Europe and the geopolitical North and have gained strength over recent years. The degrowth movement and ecofeminism undermine the basis of chauvinist feelings of ‘entitlement’ to prosperity and of widespread fears of being socially deprived by the presence of migrants or refugees, insofar as these struggles fundamentally  question the narrative that the western, European way of life equals prosperity or a good life. As Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen puts it, “we inhabitants of the northern hemisphere are materially well-supplied or even over-supplied, but nevertheless we experience needs. The big problems of our times are individualistic isolation, loneliness and existential fears, as well as the recourse to racist, nationalist patterns of conviviality as we lack of emancipatory concepts.”

Movements such as degrowth and ecofeminism tackle consumption patterns of the imperial mode of living in their everyday dimension, thus opening up possibilities of active transformation for people in the geopolitical global North. These movements make it possible to collectively learn  that modes of living which require less material consumption do not necessarily mean a loss, but can give rise to genuine enrichment.

Of course, our social reproduction and the fulfillment of our needs do have a material dimension. But this material dimension a) does not necessarily have to be governed exclusively by money – see for example the debate and practice around commons and commonism – and b) is not the only dimension there is to poverty and wealth. Notions of abundance, value, and wealth related to quality of relationships, self-determination, self-reliance, the ability to redistribute, the experience of finding meaning in life, and the effective power to act are systematically made invisible by the poverty indicators which dominate the development discourse: quality of life is reduced to money, consumption and, at best, access to public services.

In the last decade, the alternative paradigm of Buen Vivir(living well) – emerged from some Latin American countries as a counter-narrative to capitalist wellbeing. It considers humans as part of Nature, thus promotes harmonic relations with all other beings, and puts emphasis on communitarian construction from below in a territorial sense, leaving plenty of room for diversity. Other important principles are equilibrium, reciprocity and complementarity instead of accumulation, progress, growth and competition. Buen vivir, if it is developed from the bottom up and, above all, in democratic ways – will inevitably have different shapes in different contexts. This is why emancipatory debates in Latin America increasingly speak of los buenos vivires in plural.

Movements such as degrowth or the commons can connect with struggles around Buen Vivir, post-extractivism and post-development in the global South, opening up a perspective through which people in the geopolitical North and South can work together to overcome the hegemony of the imperial mode of living. These approaches also take on responsibility for challenging imperial day-to-day practices and can directly and simultaneously address the root causes of forced migration, often caused by compensatory mass-consumption elsewhere, and the roots of the global ecological crisis.

Considering social welfare globally

Finally, what about the alleged threat that migration poses to the welfare state? If we are consequently striving for social equity, we can only consider welfare or social security in a truly global manner. Although this might sound threatening at first, in my opinion nobody has a birth right to certain social benefits. Some of the feminist debates around care and commons are path-breaking here. If it is impossible to globally extend the social welfare state, as it has existed only in a small part of the world, and only for a few decades – on the basis of cheap energy and centuries of previous value transfer from the global South – then we need to replace the utopia of the social welfare state with alternative concepts. The commoning of care might be a possible pathway, while at the same time reducing the hours dedicated to paid labor – without abstaining from the state altogether, which would still need to provide the ideal conditions for this kind of commoning.

If it is impossible to globally extend the social welfare state then we need to replace the utopia of the social welfare state with alternative concepts.

Consequently, anti-racist movements and critical migration research cannot be content with fighting the European border regime by advocating open borders.. As an offensive strategy against racist prosperity-chauvinism, their critiques should just as much focus on the imperial mode of living and the associated uneven North-South relationships, as well as hegemonic perceptions of a good life. An up-to-date perspective on inter-peoples-relations should clearly tackle the root causes of forced migration by effectively reducing the energy and matter consumed in the global North, and, at the same time, develop new approaches for a global social welfare that do not consider welfare as a privilege related to one’s dwelling place or birth right.

The cruise ship Royal Princess at port in Gibraltar. Photo: Tony Evans.

A version of this article first appeared on Degrowth.de.

Miriam Lang is professor for Social and Global Studies at the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar in Quito, Ecuador. She studied Latin American Studies at Free University of Berlin and holds a PhD in Sociology. In the 1990s she was active in the anti-racist movement in Berlin. She has lived in Latin America since 2003, and for the last 12 years in Ecuador.

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A lifetime opposing the US military on Okinawa

Japanese police carrying away a protester. Photo: Eliza Egret

by Eliza Egret and Tom Anderson

There are eighty of us sitting down, linking arms, blocking the gates of a US military base. Private security guards are lined up behind us, while men in uniform film us from behind barbed-wire fences. Suddenly, Japanese police officers pile out of their vans in their dozens. They grab a protester, a woman in her seventies. She goes limp and screams “US bases out of Okinawa!” as they carry her away. Anguish is written on her face. We desperately hold onto each other, knowing that we’re also about to be grabbed. We try to resist the police prying our arms apart. One by one, we’re removed from the gates and put into a police pen. It takes forty-five minutes to remove us all.   

As anti-militarist activists, we visited the Japanese island of Okinawa in August 2017 to join the protests against US military bases. Over the course of the week, we join these sit-ins three times a day, every day. The number of people at the protests ranges from 20 to 200. Many activists are in their seventies or eighties. People chant and sing Okinawan protest songs as they wait for the police to drag them away. We get bruises and sore arms from the force of the officers.

In July 2014, the people of Okinawa began blockading the gates of Camp Schwab, a US military base situated in Henoko village, to try to prevent its expansion. Since then, activists have come from all over Japan, and occasionally from around the world, to join locals in preventing construction materials and vehicles from entering the site. Many protesters have been arrested, and several have been imprisoned for anti-base activities.  

The plans for Henoko include the relocation of an existing US military facility to Camp Schwab and the building of a runway and helipads on the ocean, directly on top of a coral reef. The runway will have disastrous consequences for Oura bay, a fragile aquatic ecosystem home to many unique species. The population of endangered dugong and green turtles will also be threatened. The costs of the construction at Camp Schwab are paid for by the Japanese government.

In 1997, a referendum found that the majority of local people opposed the plans for the base. In 2007, a survey indicated that 85% of the population of Okinawa were against  the new construction. Despite this, the Japanese government and US military are pressing ahead with their plans.

Towards the end of the Second World War, the US invaded Okinawa. One in four Okinawans were killed during the Battle of Okinawa. After the war, the US military took over the Japanese military bases on the island. They have had a presence there ever since.

After Japan surrendered in 1945, the US began a military occupation of the whole country. When power was handed back to the Japanese government in 1952, it was on the condition  that the occupation of Okinawa and the rest of the Ryukyu islands continued. The US military wanted Okinawa as a strategic base to dominate China and Southeast Asia. Okinawa had been under US military rule for 27 years, until the island was brought back under Japanese control in 1972.

Although the US occupation had officially ended, its military personnel never left Japan. There are approximately 50,000 US military personnel in Japan, over half of whom remain stationed in Okinawa. Okinawa houses 70% of US military bases in the country, but covers only 0.6% of the country’s landmass. US bases occupy a massive 18% of the land on the island.

Since the occupation of Japan, Japanese governments have followed a policy of strategic alliance with US militarism. This means that the government will not oppose US bases on Japanese soil.

The US military has made its presence felt. Islanders are subjected to daily Osprey helicopter flights, which cause stress, sleep deprivation, and noise pollution. Forty-five Ospreys have crashed on the island since 1972. Military vehicles are a regular sight on the streets and soldiers use the north of the island, including the places where people live, for armed jungle training. US marines have been responsible for over a thousand violent crimes on the island since 1972, including rapes and murders. The US have tested the chemical toxin Agent Orange on Okinawa.

The demonstrations outside Camp Schwab would not exist if it weren’t for the older population of Okinawa, some of whom attend the sit-ins three times per day. 71 year old Hiroshi Ashitomi is a respected elder of the campaign. He makes enthusiastic speeches over the microphone, giving courage to those who are about to be removed by the police. Ashitomi agreed to talk to us about what it’s like to live with the military presence in Okinawa, and about the opposition to the base. He speaks to us in Japanese as an activist friend translates for us.

Hiroshi Ashitomi. Photo: Eliza Egret

Can you tell us about your childhood?

I was born in 1946, just after World War Two. My father went to university in Tokyo and he couldn’t return to Okinawa during the war. So I was born in Tokyo. When I was fifteen years old I came back to Okinawa. The US military was here.

How did the military occupation affect your family?

Under US occupation all of Okinawa was poor. Okinawan people were farmers but lots of land was taken by the military. The US military have a big base, Camp Hansen, in Kin, where my family lived. More than half of my father’s land was taken by the US army base. The US military compensated us for the land but it was not good money.

Can you tell us about the seizures of land by the military?

The Japanese military took Okinawan people’s land during the Second World War. After the war, the US military took control of the Japanese bases. During the Korean and Vietnam wars the US military took more and more land for their bases. They took it by force, using bulldozers and bearing arms. The people didn’t have any choice but to give up their land. There was no democracy and they colonised Okinawa. There were no rights for the people. That’s why Okinawan people have always protested against the military.

At that time the idea of Okinawan independence wasn’t very common, so we were fighting for Okinawa to return to Japan.

During the Vietnam war some US soldiers ran away from the US military, and Okinawan people supported them.

Photo: Eliza Egret

What happened when the occupation ended and Okinawa returned to Japan?

When Okinawa was returned to Japan the situation didn’t change at all. The US miltary bases remained. Now the Japanese government is against us, too. The Japanese government will never say no to the US military.

Can you explain the effects of the continued US military presence on the people in Okinawa?

The military have been responsible for rapes, murders, road-traffic accidents and drunk driving. One small example of the behaviour of the military is that sometimes soldiers don’t pay taxi drivers.  They get out of taxi at the gate and run into the base without paying.

The military also causes environmental pollution, and there is noise pollution from helicopters. At night, after 10pm, they fly over our houses while people are trying to sleep.

In 1995, three US soldiers raped a 13 year old girl. People were very angry and the anti-base movement got bigger and bigger.

Two and a half years ago a female US soldier was raped at Camp Schwab. Afterwards she committed suicide.

In 2016, a 20 year old Okinawan woman, Rina Shimabukoro, was raped and killed by a former US marine. It was really terrible. Many more rape cases are happening in Okinawa and are not reported. As long as the US military is here it will keep happening again and again.

Could you tell us about the resistance to the expansion of the US base at Henoko?

After we heard about the new plans, in 1997, people in Nago city organised a residents’ referendum to decide whether they would say yes or no to the new plan. More than half of the people voted no. That referendum was very confusing for the people because many of them worked for the company that would get the base construction contract. It was hard for the workers and their family to say no because they might have lost their jobs and also because the base construction would have given them work. But still over 50% voted no.

Poster against the expanded US base in Okinawa. Source: Okinawa Peace Support

Since then, what strategies have people used to oppose the new base construction?

We have to show the US government that we don’t agree. The Okinawan governor has visited the US government to send the voice of Okinawan people many times.

In 2004, activists began using kayaks to monitor the military base from the sea. A tent was set up by the beach where people came to learn about peace, and about the history of Okinawa.  

Three years ago, when they started bringing the construction vehicles in, a protest tent and sit-in at the gates of Camp Schwab started. Police come and take us away but we sit again and again. We try to show the world and the government that we’ll never give up. That’s our motto: never give up.

Our protest is based on non-violence. The network of people in Okinawa against the US military includes local businesses and conservative people, not only activists but ordinary people. If we didn’t have mainstream support the police would destroy the protest very quickly. Non-violent tactics are important to get more people to support the protest in Henoko.  

How do you keep going?

We try to come up with new ideas for the protests and keep doing it. It’s very hard protesting every day. But if we gave up, nothing would change.

It must be very stressful for the older people to be physically removed by the police every day, yet they make up the most numbers at the protests. Can you explain why?

Older people, even older than me, experienced the Battle of Okinawa during World War Two and they know how terrible it was. Under the US military occupation we suffered a lot of abuse and discrimination. So we know how to survive in this situation. That generation of older people have more passion than the younger people because they don’t want to see the same situation ever again. That’s why they sit there every day.

Do people in Okinawa want international support at the sit-ins?

We have to unite internationally otherwise we cannot win against the power of the US. We also need foreign media to come, interview people and spread information.

I just heard that the network of groups against the US bases in Okinawa received an international peace prize in Germany. So we know that international people are watching what happens here.

It’s good if international people can come and join us on the demonstrations, but please arrange a translator!

Would it be good for people internationally to hold solidarity demonstrations outside US embassies and consulates?

Yes, this would be very welcome. Donations would also be welcome. We need money to organise transport for the demonstrators and to pay for lawyers when people are arrested.

A women taken away at a protest. Photo: Eliza Egret

There are daily shuttle buses from Naha city, close to Okinawa’s airport and port, to the sit-in at Henoko. If you are interested in joining the protests in Okinawa, and would like to know more, email eliza@shoalcollective.org and tom@shoalcollective.org.

Here is a list of some of the Japanese websites with information about the protests in Okinawa:

https://henokoblue.wordpress.com/ – The blog of the kayak team monitoring the base in Henoko.

http://takae.ti-da.net – for info about the movement against helipad construction in Takae, in the North of Okinawa.

http://apjjf.org/ – Has some interesting articles in English about Okinawa.

 

Eliza and Tom are both part of Shoal Collective, a new cooperative producing writing for social justice and a world beyond capitalism. Follow Shoal Collective’s writing on Twitter @ShoalCollective